Sometimes a picture shows more than a thousand words
A new study out in the journal Trends in Genetics, authored by Stanford University professor Gerald Crabtree, shows that in the past, when our ancestors (and those who failed to become our ancestors) faced the harsh realities of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the punishment for stupidity was more often than not death. And so, Crabtree argues, enormous evolutionary pressure bore down on early humans, selecting out the dimwits, and raising the intellect of the survivors' descendants. But not so today.
It is worth remembering that the humans with the largest brain sizes were actually found among the Neanderthals. Still, over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. "This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.” said the University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks. Presumably that means in California too, eh.
Crabtree's research showed that for more than 99 per cent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities surviving on our wits, leading to big-brained humans. Since the invention of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effectively stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical “intelligence” genes. As genetic mutations increase over future generations, will humans be doomed to buying new iPhones every year to watch soap-opera repeats on [while eating non-labeled GMO munchies]?
California has always been the leader in cultural trends, guess they still are.
